Training yourself to lucid dream?

I've had at least one lucid dream that I can recall. I was so shocked it only lasted a few moments before I woke up. I'd really appreciate some specifics on training yourself to lucid dream. How do I prepare myself? Does one have to be in a certain mental state in their waking life to be able to attain this skill? And once you finally find yourself in a lucid dream how do you keep calm to keep yourself from suddenly waking up?

reply to post by RightInTwo


That's a great question! Hopefully someone with a good answer and some experience will add to this thread. I'm quite interested in hearing about this myself!

I suggest ld4all.com is a good start.
I used that one to do my research into lucid dreaming. I haven't been able to go lucid yet, there are too many stresses that are keeping me from remembering my dreams. But im working on it. The key is to keep at it!


Edit: Keep a dream journal is a good way to begin, i have one, its slowly getting pages written in it. I wish i remembered my dreams more. The last one i had seemed pretty lucid, but it was a nightmare, and terrifying. So i didnt really WANT to remember it. Oh boy, floods in my dreams..

I woke up one morning and realized that I was sleeping in a strange position.

"When I went to sleep I was laying on my back" I told myself. Was I on my back when I woke up and just rolled over, not fully awake yet? Or did I toss and turn during the night. I wanted to know. The next night, and for a week after I tried to detect how I woke up.

Day 1: I was on the bus to school when I remembered to check how I had woken up. Far too late to tell.

Day 2: I was getting on the bus when I remembered.

Day 3: I was washing my plate after breakfast when I remembered.

Day 4: I was in the bath when I remembered to check how I woke up. Still too late to tell, but trending in the right direction.


Friday Day 5:

My eyes just blink open and I look around the room without moving. I'm in a very strange position compared to how I went to sleep. I must have been tossing and turning in the night. But not only that, I have complete awareness of a dream I was just having.

As I get ready for school, I finish up a homework assignment, and cook breakfast for the family as everyone is moving too slow for me. On the bus I'm checking an essay for spelling when I notice something.

Half the people on the bus to school are still sleeping. Literally their heads are nodding and their eyes are half closed. That day I noticed that many students didn't wake up till halfway through homeroom.




After that I started writing down my dreams when I woke up. Waking up instantly showed me that I had dreams every night and by transcribing them I was able to store them in my long term memory instead of loosing them after the 2.88 minutes of short term memory faded.

Lucid dreaming started that summer.

My conclusion?
It' all in how one wakes up.


David Grouchy

I rarely dream at all these days. Period.

How about some help on "Training yourself to Dream"

Is it down to my irregular sleeping (and lack-of) patterns?

As for lucid dreaming, I may have done it once or twice by luck in the past...Sooo much more intense than a normal dream. Why would you wanna put yourself through that?!

A few beers and some pizza before bed does the trick for me. Seriously though I find that I have more lucid dreams after a few cocktails and some food before going to bed. Actually I have more dreams period when I do this.

reply to post by SmoKeyHaZe


Everyone dreams, every night. Its just the way we wake up generally. If you jolted awake, or if your sleep patterns are all out of whack, then yeah, the recall of your dreams just doesnt come. But you train subconcious in this as well, before you go to sleep, repeat a mantra "I will wake up, and remember my dreams" or whatever fits your fancy.

Keep a dream journal, envision yourself writing in the journal. And each night you do this, it inches you closer, you'll remember fragments at first probably, then pieces, then soon enough you'll recall the 4 - 6 dreams you have a night. When you can remember 1 or 2 dreams a night, you're ready to lucid dream. Theres different techniques. The website about has it all there.

First learn to remember your dreams (write them down). Once you can remember a couple pages worth of dreams every morning, do this...

Set yourself some little rules... for instance, during the day every time that you see a clock ask yourself, "Is this a dream?" The rule can be anything, just something that will make you ask that question often every day.

You'll notice that you start dreaming about asking yourself this question... and NOT realizing that you ARE dreaming lol.

Now you're almost there, the best tip I ever got...

If you normally wake up at 6 set your alarm for 3, get out of bed and go for a twenty minute walk (you HAVE TO GET OUT OF BED AND DO SOMETHING, it will not work if you just lay in bed for twenty minutes). Go back to bed, asking yourself "is this a dream, is this a dream..."

I've lucid dreamt once. A couple of dreams were close to lucid dreaming but not quite like the one. Lately I've been having a hard time remembering them.
A good piece of advice I've read is to ask yourself like 5 times a day "Am i dreaming?"
When I LD'd I remember I asked someone in the dream if I was dreaming or not, and he said something completely nonsensical. That's when I realized I was lucid dreaming. Well at that time, I just realized I was completely conscious in a dream. I learned the term lucid dreaming after that.

I've been interested in this for 8 years now with varying degrees of success. It's much easier to do when you're either sleep deprived or after waking up and 30-60min later going back to sleep. W.I.L.D makes for the best and most memorable experiences.

For those of you who think you don't dream, when you wake up spend about 5-10min in bed, moving as little as possible, trying to remember where you just were and what you were doing. This is the type of work you need to do to remember your dreams. Hell, you could have had a fully lucid dream where you were talking to aliens. If you don't attempt to recall your dreams it will go forgotten. It's not entirely necessary to write your dream down, just do the act of recalling after you wake up. If you get up and go to brush your teeth without thinking about it, it's very likely you would by that point have no way of remembering already.

Once you start to venture out into the lucid dream world, you'll very quickly realize it's not easy. You may realize it is a matrix of your mind and you can bend any rule, but you wont be Neo by any means right off the bat. You'll also see that if you get tooo excited, the world will fall apart before your eyes into blackness and now feel yourself lying in bed.

I know how hard it is NOT to get excited but you need to do your best to just observe at first. When you become lucid, don't think about what you want to do or what you can do, I suggest let the dream continue as it was. Don't try and change your environment all at once either, if you desire to be in a certain place, use a door! Imagine a door behind you, turn around and imagine the other side being your desired location. Doors have been an extremely useful tool for me to navigate. If your environment changes before your eyes, it's likely to become unstable and you wake up. Also, if you're a person who hasn't had much luck with the opposite sex, going too fast into it will also likely end up in you waking up. Take it slow, take in the sensation of touch, sound, sight, it all seems so real and with VIVID colors.

If you should find your world starting to destablilize, I suggest moving your eyes side to side as fast as you can, for some reason I've found it very effective in stopping what I know would have been me wakeing up. Other methods are looking at your hands, spinning, trying to focus (but not close enough to read fine print) but the first method mentioned has helped me the most.

As far as getting yourself lucid, I've heard of methods such as "reality checks", whenever you preform a certain task during the day, think to yourself "is this real?". The idea is that it becomes routine and if that same task comes up in a dream you automaticly do a reality check and find things arn't quite the same this time. The most luck I had with this was doing a reality check whenever I was at school or work since the two locations appeared in my dreams more than I wanted, lol. A task like turing on the light switch and thinking "is this real?" has helped others but it didn't work so great for me.

Now, I don't use any method per se, i've just become more receptive to when I am dreaming. I have lucid dreams almost every night now, usually not the whole dream being lucid but going in and out of the lucid realization. I'm STILL working on keeping things stable, how to break down these barriers my mind puts up on what I can and can't do. If you ever doubt yourself, like say you were flying and now you want to show your friend, if you think for a second you might not be able to do it, you wont. Or something else will go wrong. You have to realize you can in fact do anything you can imagine and that's not an easy thing to do.

Well i'm going to stop now before I pump out a small novel, lol, hope someone can use some of my experience for the best in their lucid journies! Have fun

Originally posted by AzureSky
reply to post by SmoKeyHaZe

 

Everyone dreams, every night. Its just the way we wake up generally. If you jolted awake, or if your sleep patterns are all out of whack, then yeah, the recall of your dreams just doesnt come. But you train subconcious in this as well, before you go to sleep, repeat a mantra "I will wake up, and remember my dreams" or whatever fits your fancy.

Keep a dream journal, envision yourself writing in the journal. And each night you do this, it inches you closer, you'll remember fragments at first probably, then pieces, then soon enough you'll recall the 4 - 6 dreams you have a night. When you can remember 1 or 2 dreams a night, you're ready to lucid dream. Theres different techniques. The website about has it all there.

So...even when I'm sometimes getting about 3-4 hours sleep, I'll still be dreaming? My sleep patterns are completely out of whack...Even when I end up getting a good 7 and a half hours sleep, I won't remember a single thing...It's been like this for a long time now.

But I'll definitely give those techniques you suggested a go...

Does taking recreational drugs also affect dreams?

After 30 years of Lucid Dream experimenting, the easiest way for me is when I wake up, then go back to sleep, to stay absolutely still and breathe evenly at the same rate. That usually fools my mind into believing my body is asleep. I can feel the sleep paralysis cover me like a blanket and then I can follow those lucid images into a dream.

It is helpful to sleep on my back. Also, If I can't exit sleep paralysis, I just change my breathing to an irregular pattern and then my body wakes up.

Only advice i have would be try waking yourself up, just as practice around the time you would usually get up in the morning or if your napping then just whenever. When i was about 13 i remember having a conversation with my friend about Taking control of our dreams. If my understanding is correct, than that is called having a lucid dream. They way I have I conjure up a lucid dream is during the dream realize what you are doing and literally take control. And If you can catch yourself right before your about to fall asleep it seems easier to be able to realize what your doing.

reply to post by Artanis667

For those of you who think you don't dream, when you wake up spend about 5-10min in bed, moving as little as possible, trying to remember where you just were and what you were doing. This is the type of work you need to do to remember your dreams. Hell, you could have had a fully lucid dream where you were talking to aliens. If you don't attempt to recall your dreams it will go forgotten. It's not entirely necessary to write your dream down, just do the act of recalling after you wake up. If you get up and go to brush your teeth without thinking about it, it's very likely you would by that point have no way of remembering already.

Cool, when I wake up, my head is always a blur, due to sleep deprivation.

So, actually people dream every single night? It makes sense for me to try recall it. When I do remember my dreams on that rare occasion, they're usually quite boring anyway. Nowhere near the level of some of the dreams I've read by some here.

reply to post by RightInTwo


I have two things to suggest that helped me accomplish lucid dreaming. First, Carlos Castaneda's The Art Of Dreaming. Second the Hemi Sync lucid dreaming series. Castaneda's books might be a bit odd with all his talks of shamanism and such, but his methods of training your mind to be aware while dreaming have done the trick for thousands, if not millions over the years. The Hemi Sync audio tapes are awesome. I've never experienced anything so relaxing. The idea is that your brain can be tricked into going into different wave patterns in response to their sound pattern manipulations. The lucid dreaming series totally works for me. Whenever I haven't been having aware dreams for awhile, I go to sleep playing Hemisync on my MP3 player.

reply to post by SmoKeyHaZe


As far as I know, the REM cycle of sleep is the most important part and it's also when you really dream. Although during an 8-hour period of sleep, you may only have about 20 minutes of REM cycle sleep. We do dream every night but the longer the time between REM and when you wake up can contribute to a lessened ability to recall what happend.

As far as sleep deprevation goes, the less sleep you get, the faster your mind jumps its self into REM to catch up on missed cycles. I don't advise doing this often, if at all, but if you stay up for say 24-48 hours, set your alarm clock for a nap (20-30min) you'll almost immidiatly jump into REM. I've had a few LONG lucid dreams this way waking up to realize it had only been 10 minutes.

For some reason, my REM cycles on a normal sleep night tend to be near the end of my sleep cycle. I usually wake up out of REM making it pretty easy for me to remember what just happend.

I noticed someone above asking about recreational drugs affecting dreams, I can't say either way. I've experimented in my day and I can't say exactly how they have affected my dreams. I've also drank Mugwort tea before going to sleep and had some pretty vivid dreams that way. As far as pharmacuticals go Benedryl has had the most clear cut effect for me. After taking 200mg of it one time, I found myself laying on my couch, teetering on the edge of reality and the dream world. Whenever I'd close my eyes I'd be somewhere else, unaware that I was actually still just laying down. Eventually during that short dream I'd realize I was in fact still laying down and open my eyes. Then I'd close them just to enter another place, unaware it wasn't real again.

That experience was insane to say the least and if anyone wants to explore dyphenhydramine, I suggest reading up on Erowid, doseage, reports, 100mg is the safe dose in UK, 50mg being USA's standard, don't overdo it. I'm not advocating the use of Benedryl recreationally, I was using it as a sleep aid at one point and noticed some strange effects if I stayed up past the delirious stage.

reply to post by RightInTwo


this is the website i go to; a ton a great information and a lot a knowledgeable people

www.dreamviews.com...

good luck and maybe i will see you there

Thanks for the valuable information so far everyone.

One way that's worked great for me, is the looking at your hands method.

Every day, several times look at your hands and ask "Am I dreaming" if you do this after something odd happens, like you loose something, or just in general you have an odd feeling, it's even better.

Reason being, in dreams your fingers generally are not accurate, like the clock method someone else mentioned.

I usually have extra fingers when I do this, or my fingers are obscured, and I can't really make them out. Either way, I notice it in my dreams. Although, about 50% of the time, my extra fingers, or obscured fingers will just seem completely normal, even while asking myself "am I dreaming?" and I'll just continue dreaming without becoming lucid. Although it seems the other 50% of the time, I realize I'm dreaming, become lucid, but then wake up shortly afterward.

I've probably had 7-8 lucid dreams so far this year. Unfortunately nothing interesting really ever happens, since as I said, I usually wake up shortly after becoming lucid.

Someone asked about drug use. In my experience, smoking certain plants stops you from remembering your dreams. Several years ago I stopped smoking certain plants, afterward I was able to remember my dreams MUCH more clearly and frequently. Before I stopped, I barely ever remembered my dreams.

I just need to work on staying asleep after I realize I'm dreaming, I've read that spinning around in your dream after you become lucid can help you stay asleep, but I never remember this while I'm dreaming.

The dreamscape is a crazy place, I wish I could spend more time in it while aware.

reply to post by RightInTwo


Lucid Dreaming is not a click away and know it all information. Let me define lucid dreaming training in my own terms. Convincing yourself that this reality isn't real and that its controllable. My advice would be to seek out a legitimate Tibetan Master. Us Buddhists have a clear perception of lucid dreaming.